Instead Mozilla has made the curious decision to pull the plug on the long-delayed project, while offering only small clues as to why the decision was made.

The announcement was posted by Mozilla Engineering Manager Benjamin Smedberg on the Bugzilla development page. He ordered Mozilla employees and community developers:

Please stop building windows 64 builds and tests.

As for why the he opted to pull the plug on 64-bit for now, he comments, "Many plugins are not available in 64-bit versions. The plugins that are available don’t work correctly in Firefox because we haven’t implemented things like windowproc hooking, which means that hangs are more common."

Firefox 64-bit development is dead for now. [Image Source: Flickr/dimnikolov]

Adobe plugins do generally suck, with their closed proprietaryness that nobody but Adobe can fix.

But quite frankly, when today you can buy 16 GB of RAM for under $60, is a few hundred megabytes of utilization really that much of a concern? I agree that code efficiency has plummeted in recent years, but with tens of GB of memory in consumer desktop PC's, I can see how nobody cares.